rpanons | Everything is under control

Everything is under control

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Concerns?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I wish the game wasn't capped.

Though I understand why people like keeping the population small, I'd like to see a new team or two myself.

I wouldn't mind another team or two, either. The pool isn't shrinking at all and just getting bigger, and I know people want to keep the game small! But that pool.

Adding another team or two will help the pool for a couple of months and then it will just get that big again and you'll be clamoring for even more teams. It's happened every time they've added new teams and it will keep happening. Personally I like the stability the game has, it would be a very different environment if there were a lot of drops all the time. And I say this as someone who's had to wait for months to get a character in.

I like the stability, too, personally, and I can completely agree with it being a different environment if there were a lot of drops all the time. I wouldn't want that to happen at all, which is why I'm glad it doesn't happen. The teams would function a lot differently than they do now if there were a lot of drops.

Even then, though, the number of apps in the pool (43) does seem sort of overwhelming. That's more of what I meant.

It is overwhelming, but the fact is that adding more teams isn't a solution. Adding more teams just means that the pool gets eaten into for a little while and then gets bigger again once those teams stabilise. The only way for the pool to shrink is if there are more drops or less apps.

I know, and that's what makes this a complicated situation. Hopefully it will all work itself out for the best on its own without more teams getting added.

I disagree with the idea that the game should stay THE SAME WAY ALWAYS and that adding one or two teams wouldn't solve anything on the long run. It is a solution TO ME because it would mean you would have more permanent slots open, you would offer more characters that could improve CR and variety in general. At this point, it feels unfair to tell people to wait several months to get in (and yes, I realize that's how it's supposed to be but a three or four months wait to RP IS ridiculous, even if it's a cap) so I'm hoping the mods will eventually decide to expand.

I don't want Aather to become MASSIVE and the game isn't designed for that, but adding less than 15 characters would help permanently if you consider there would be more slots to improve the queue on the long run.

They've tried it twice before and that hasn't been how it's played out. There are a lot of drops at first in the new teams but then things stabilise and characters stop dropping and the queue grows again. Aather would have to become massive in order to reach a size where drops could happen at the current rate but people could still get in quickly. Besides which, more drops means less feeling of stability for the characters.

It is unfortunate that people have to wait for months on end, but honestly the only thing I can see that would reduce apps is to limit characters to 2 per person again, and even that would barely do anything considering the vast majority of players only have one or two characters.

I know, I was there for those expansions. However, it was still a BABY GAME, and it's been over several months since then and I don't recall the queue ever getting this big before. The queue won't get any smaller if we ignore it, though. I don't think putting a limit to 2 characters per person would help any, either. So I still consider the game could benefit from an expansion and more people seem willing to try that now. Besides, there are other benefits from it. And while stability is good and I agree there, there's a difference between that and stagnation. Which is what I want to avoid IC and more characters would improve that.

It was a baby game and it still didn't help the queue for long. It's going to help even less now. In fact, I suspect that creating new teams will just encourage even more people to app and the queue will end up even bigger than before. After all, the current people have apped into a climate where they know they might have to wait a few months. If steps were being taken to ameliorate that then all the people currently discouraged by the wait would go for it.

It did help, otherwise we would have over 150 apps on the queue right now.

So what if that encourages them? Sometimes it's necessary for a game to expand and new people wouldn't ruin the game. On the contrary, in fact.

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration and I don't really agree with it in the first place. I like having twelve teams and I think it would have been a pity if the game had stayed smaller, but I don't think we have very many more drops now just because we have twelve teams.

New people would be great, I'm just saying that the current queue is made of people prepared to wait for months. Expanding would probably cause an influx of apps on top of that already and that would just bring us right back to the situation we're currently at.

NA

Just because they are prepared doesn't mean they should be prepared. No RP comes with the expectation that you test your patience by being in the queue for months. Just because they were expecting that doesn't mean they should. That's a ridiculous notion to consider in and of itself.

I believe the queue is around 40% of the game's size. While there is the fact that you (assuming you are the same anon) pointed out that new teams take a lot of shuffling, that was the case when the game opened. Turquoise in particular changed a lot. Peridot did, too. Ruby has, as well. In all these cases, the teams have shifted into having very well-defined identities.

The game should have new teams. I can't see the reasoning for not having it unless the game will seem unwieldy, but there is no way for anyone to play with everyone else. Ideally the game should not need more than two teams. I don't believe cutting the third character cap would help, because I think only around five characters would be lost in the queue, and not many in the game proper. Also, forcing a player to drop their character is rude. I am not saying you suggested that, but it is a possible implication. A player might feel guilty continuing to have a character past an obsolete rule, and that wouldn't be kind to anyone.

And returning to your "prepared to wait" note, I personally have a hard time knowing if a character will click unless I've started to play the character. While there are other options to explore how the character works, Aather is a very unique setting and you can't "test-drive" the character, so to speak. Thus, the expectation of waiting becomes all the more unusual given the circumstances. If it was a different game where you could scratch your itch to see if you should wait to get in, I absolutely understand. However, the conditions of Aather don't make that possible.

I know that there is no perfect solution, but it is the only one that makes the most sense to some of the playerbase. Talking about incidental circumstances of teams doesn't remove that.

DA

I really dislike the idea that more drops would necessarily be detrimental. Stability is good; stagnation is not. I don't like hoping for people to drop just to get new faces and players in the game, but that's where I end up finding myself with the current situation and I don't think I'm alone in this.

I think, ideally, the game would be big enough to support long term, stable characters as well as a healthy turnover. As it stands the size of the game discourages people from experimenting with riskier characters, and encourages squatting on the characters you already have since who wants to drop only to wait three or four months to get a new character in?

I don't know that dropping the character limit would really be a great way to handle it either.

The fact is that the pool is about 1/3 the size of the active RP and growing faster than it's shrinking. The current bottleneck is really unsustainable.

Yes, ideally it would be that size, but I don't believe that it can be that size and still stay a small game. Adding two more teams isn't even going to get through half of the app pool. You would still end up hoping for people to drop just to see new faces eventually. People are well aware that apping requires a long wait and they are still choosing to do it. It will eventually reach a natural equilibrium point when people stop apping because they don't want to wait that long. I totally agree that there are a lot of problems with the way things are, and I don't think that adding two more teams would impact on the feel of the game or make it much harder to run games. But adding enough places to mean there are enough characters that there's always turnover would change the game completely.

I am very uncomfortable with the idea of waiting for the game to reach a "natural equilibrium" because it seems to make new players or players who want to app second or third characters into a problem. If we wait them out and ignore them, they'll go away on their own.

I'm all for fixing things and being welcoming and getting people into the game faster, but expanding is only going to do that for a couple of months and then we'll be having this discussion all over again.

I don't really see how we get people into the game faster without having more available slots. I'd certainly love to hear ideas for that, and maybe those could be implemented along with an expansion so this doesn't happen again in a couple of months.

Though honestly, I'm not entirely convinced that it will. You seem to be assuming unlimited growth, but that won't necessarily be the case. A lot of the apps in the pool are seconds and thirds, not new players joining the game, and those people probably aren't going to rush to app again immediately. Things might find more equilibrium when more of the people already in the game have balanced their individual lineups.

I've actually seen on this very community in threads where anons have mentioned that they would love to join Aather, but the queue makes it impossible. You are saying that people don't want to join the game and most of the apps are seconds and thirds, but you don't understand that there are people who would love to play in an active and amazing game, but are unable to. I see it all over the plurks of various players. Their friends think Aather sounds amazing, but the idea of waiting to get in for months on end is not feasible.

I think people are pretty balanced in the game, though. The implication that people need to "find balance" is also troubling. This should not be a matter of pointing fingers, but finding a solution so that people can get into the game.

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